Just seen Team America: World Police, a Thunderbirds-style movie from the South Park creators. Already in a bad humour when I went in, but surprisingly the film did very little to either exacerbate or mollify it. Bloody hungry when I entered so I got a bag of over-priced Toffee popcorn which served as both a temporary stimulant to keep me going through the movie, and an analogy for what I was watching; simple, deliberately clichéed, but fundamentally unsatisfying. The puppet joke elicited giggles the first few times, but it feels like making a movie pretending to be a thuggiflick . Parody too near to the subject merely repeats it; Scream replicated Nightmare on Elm Street, but Scary Movie most certainly didn’t replicate Scream. Perhaps the difference was in the number and quality of jokes (TA: WP has a middling number of fairly poor ones), but whatever, the puppets didn’t help. Perhaps puppetry would have worked better with film noir than an action film, where the grotesques would have been welcome; here they just served as an extraneous joke that didn’t tie in with the satire proper; I preferred South Park TBH. The movie at least felt short, which was a good thing; nobody stayed to see if there was a funny vignette at the end…